For the unfamiliar: in his role as Chair of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke became somewhat infamous for his endorsement of "quantitative easing" as a respons

For the unfamiliar: in his role as Chair of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke became somewhat infamous for his endorsement of "quantitative easing" as a response to the 2008 financial crisis. This was (oversimplified) a mildly fancy way of flooding banks with newly-printed money to offset the impact of falling asset prices. Bernanke became known in some circles as "Helicopter Ben" in reference to an earlier speech in which he (in turn) approvingly referenced Milton Friedman's thought experiment of a "helicopter drop" of cash to the general public as a method for boosting liquidity in the economy [1]. (I feel compelled to point out that as far as I can tell, there doesn't seem to be a solid consensus that quantitative easing was objectively poor policy under the circumstances; a lot of this discourse apparently fell somewhere in the gray area between good-natured ribbing, vacuous memeing, economics school schisms, and mockery of the ostensible hypocrisy of "fiscally conservative" Republicans). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_money